Re: Sinophobia and its dis (contents)

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Kristopher S. Handley" <thesubtlebody@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Has anyone else here who's checked out the box set found the liner notes on
> Raaijmakers' "Mao" pieces (not written by Raaijmakers) the least bit
> disturbing?  Claustrophobic?  Sinophobic?  Even...racist?  I only read them
> once, and I have yet to finish listening to even the first disc, but the
> liners seemed to pre-empt hungover Cold War hackles by dismissing the
> Chinese as culturally duplicitous, or some such thing.  I find that claim
> outrageous and more than a little problematic in the United States, where
> the question of racial (i.e. Chinese) profiling has figured prominently in
> the imprisonment,  imminent trial, and denial of bail to Wen Ho Lee, vis a
> vis theft of atomic technology secrets.  I'm sorry I don't have the text
> with me right now, or I would reproduce it; but I'd be interested in the
> opinions of those who have read the notes in question.  As for the music:
> remarkable, quite a new experience for my ears.

Perhaps some of the problem is that you're not Dutch. The bit about what
the Dutch writer referred to as being "gevietnamiseerd" is a more general
kind of problem for progressive thinkers/artists of the time who're still around;
Given what we now know, it's no longer possible to separate the embrace of
Maoism which (in post-60s Europe) accompanied the widespread revulsion
against American adventurism in S. E. Asia from the excesses and dreadful
dislocations occurring in Mao's China at the very same time that people like
Dick were writing the Mao pieces. For European intellectuals, that's an ongoing
discussion [and casting it as anything as Amerocentric as "hungover Cold
War hackles" wouldn't really work well when discussing this with a Dutch
audience, I think]. While there were certainly any number of American
leftists whose uncritical support for Communist regimes may seem similar,
I think it's a more pronounced problem for Europeans after die Wende.

I could be wrong, but I think your Sinophobia/racism is somewha the
result of some infelicitous translation, perhaps? Try it this way - DR's
work is about the instantiation of various ideas in physical form. What
he refers to would more properly be defined as the tendency in Chinese
philosophy and art from the pre-Confucians toward an emphasis on the
"form" of something rather than its material realities. The irony of Mao's
social realism and the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution is that it
also participated in the same creation of what the Dutch would call "types."
DR's engagement is with at, in the same way as an American artist might
be interested in looking at the relationship between some American myth
and its present-day manifestations.

Dick's work - generally, and at that time - was about physically instantiating
various ideas and linguistic- he's using the word "guide" in the literal and
physical sense [that's why there's all that stuff about Etienne-Jules Marey].
So that sense of the visible/typological and some other reality behind
it would be of tremenjus interest.

I don't entirely agree with the essayist's reading of Chinese culture on this
point, but I'm not sure that the best mode of engagement is to presume a
2K American view is the normative way to "read" the text. For example,
I think that it's a mistake to transfer your justifiably held concerns about
Wen Ho Lee to a piece of critical writing about a Dutch conceptualist and
composer's 1960s work considered in retrospect. This is always a problem
with reading across cultures.

We agree on Dick's music. I think that his influence as a teacher and as
an experimentalist is somewhat underrated - possibly because the Dutch
writer and his presumed audience thinks we *know* about Dick already
[to engage in a bit of potential stereotyping of my own, I find this to be
a regular feature of my conversations with the Dutch about their own
artists/composers who aren't well-known. You'll say, "I can't believe that
more people don't know about N. Nederlander." Your Dutch friend will
immediately talk about someone who isn't Dutch but who has similar
ideas, and will often assume that - and this is particularly true if the
person in question doesn't travel or isn't translated - everyone already
knows who needs to [i.e. the Dutch], or that they're somehow not that
interesting. You won't believe how many times I've had this discussion
about Jan Dibbets, Hans Faverey, Dick himself, and - until all the
Pritziker and hoohah a couple of years ago - Rem Koolhaas].

Gregory
--
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knowledge is not enough/science is not enough/
love is dreaming/this equation/Gregory Taylor/
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